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f(Θ)…A Second Post on Perspective

If you speak to anybody who lives in a big city, chances are you’ll find them complaining about traffic, parking or any other car-related issues. If you really think about it, cars are pretty remarkable. They help you cross distances in minutes that could have taken hours on foot, or if you were richer, on a horse or camel. Thousands of engineering man-hours have been spent to build these incredible machines that revolutized our economies and all of that was done in the last 130 years. But anyhow, when I used to live in Abu Dhabi city, the people we dreaded most were the blue-uniformed mawaqif people. Their counterparts in Mombasa are the yellow-uniformed municipality people in town. So of course, like many other people, I’ve personally been slapped with so many parking tickets in my lifetime and I found myself really annoyed at the situation, and this annoyance lead to anxiety the next time I entered the neighborhood in search for parking.

Until I changed the angle of looking at this whole situation.

After many years of paying for parking tickets, I simply added parking tickets to my annual budget. I also looked at it from the perspective of those Mawaqif people. They were just doing their jobs. They needed a roof over their head, food on their table, education for their children. So if we all behaved and nobody paid parking tickets, Mawaqif will lay off people, and many of those would be out of a job, which in essence is not really good for the economy. So with parking tickets budgeted, I stopped getting stressed about parking my car properly as long as I was below budget.

So here’s the lesson; you can always change perspectives about certain situations, by varying the angle (explains the theta in the title), and since there are 360 degrees in a revolution, don’t just stick to one.